Day 11: Continuing the sweet theme, here's an attempt at a chocolate. Didn't have a lot of time for this one, but still wanted to try something new: having modelled the basic shape and fiddled around for a bit trying to come up with a vaguely chocolatey material, I decided to have a little play with Blender's sculpting mode for the first time. Predictably it didn't go brilliantly trying to draw a pattern on the chocolate with a laptop trackpad, but here's my attempt regardless. This is why the pros have graphics tablets!

A bit too shiny, perhaps? Makes it look more like a Werthers Original than a melty Chocolate..
But nice to see the engraved design. Perhaps something like that might be easier in a 2D art package, then imported and extruded, and used to cut the shape?

Day Twelve

I spent most of today staring at fonts, trying to decide which font will be the one used for my 2019 games, and inevitably ended up selecting the same bloomin font I used in my 2016 games,
.. aw well, at least it's a nice font!! Can't argue with a nice font!!

I hate how much time seems to pass when you're flicking through hundreds of fonts...

Today's creativity, then, is just another simple set of JNKPlat levels!!
The new pack of four levels should be in the OnlineLevels section of the game.

i.e. Make a torus, slap a gold material on it, duplicate it a bunch - quick and easy! But in an attempt to at least be a bit creative, I also bunged in a shiny wooden floor to reflect the rings a bit, and made everything physics objects to get Blender to place the rings down in a pile for me, rather than placing them by hand.

The gold material is a bit naff, because I haven't really mastered sensible material parameters still. That being said, I've just realised that I could be using Blender's 'Cycles' renderer to use a modern PBR pipeline for the rendering, rather than the default non-PBR one. So maybe that's something to experiment with in future to get better looking renders.

Day Thirteen

The halfway point.
How's everyone coping? I'm not sure I am. I'm trying to get so many other things done that I'm completely losing out on the whole "Creativity" aspect. Bah, no matter, keep creating.. only another 12 days to go!!

Minutes after the first of these puzzles appeared, I suddenly realised my own smegging stupidity..

I'm doing a "If on the same row as a Queen, then is captureable" logic..
But that only works if nothing else is inbetween them.
The logic isn't working out "blocking", and the whole bloody thing's broken.

I'm coping alright... although not having a lot of time these last few days! Turns out internet was plentiful on holiday and I had plenty of downtime to make a robot in many stages, but now I'm back at work (and with plenty of other stuff going on outside work) the time pressure is getting in the way. I will almost certainly have zero time tomorrow. Maybe I'll try and throw something together after midnight.

Coming up with things to make is also a bit tricky, but having a vague theme (in my case, 3D modelling of vaguely christmas-adjacent things) does help with inspiration. But I don't really have a backlog of ideas, as such!

So, Day 13 - again, only had 20 minutes free this evening, so here's a really cheap, un-textured star. I realised as I was making it I had no idea how to make a star actually look 'christmassy', but hey, the geometry was fun to make.

Day 14: Since I definitely won't have time tomorrow evening, I've done #14 in the early hours instead. Decided to make a mug, because that's vaguely winter-related. As well as being another chance to try out the bevel tool - and then realising this needed some overlapping-vertex tidy up because the bevels on each side perfectly line up - I also used this to try out the Cycles renderer for the first time. It's much slower than Blender's normal renderer, but looks so much better! I could probably have spent more time making a nice material for the mug to take full advantage of this, but eh.

Day Fifteen

Today I added another new puzzle to Foldapuz.Multi Box is a grid of numbers. Each row and column should contain only 3 numbers which multiply to give the end result.
Cross out all the digits that don't figure!

Cycles is the name of Blender's photorealistic rendering engine. AFAICT it uses raytracing, physically based rendering, etc in order to achieve a more realistic render than the default, simple renderer. Though I've not actually investigated it in depth!

Today, I was meant to be pushed for time because I was supposed to be moving furniture to my new place. Instead, I spent most of the day being rather sick, and was pushed for time because of that instead!

I almost decided to make a 'festive' sick bucket, but ultimately decided to revisit the mug I made before and do the UV-unwrapping and geometry tidy-up needed to texture it.